All articles in the Farm in, Farm Out Section:

Italian operator ENI(70%) and its partner Vitol (30%) have been awarded rights to Block WB03, located in the medium deep waters of the prolific Tano Basin, offshore Ghana.

ENI will be the Operator of the license and besides Vitol the Joint Venture will include the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) and a local registered Company that will be identified during the phase of contract finalization. The Contract award is subject to approval from the Authorities.

This award comes as an outcome of Ghana’s first international competitive bid round, in which 5 Blocks have been put on offer in water depths ranging from 100 to 4,400 m.

In Ghana’s Tano Basin ENI owns rights to the Development Areas of Sankofa and Gye Nyame as well as to the Exploration and Production area of CTP-Block 4. The new block is located approximately 50km south-east from the FPSO John Agyekum Kufuor (JAK) that is currently producing oil and gas from Sankofa Field. The proximity of these infrastructures will became synergic in case of new discoveries in Block 3.

Ghana is among the key Countries for Eni’s organic growth. The company has been present in the Country since 2009 and accounts currently a gross production of about 70,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.

The Ugandan government started its second licensing round by offering five acreages in its proven Albertine Basin.

Irene Muloni, the country’s Minister for Energy and Mineral Development, announced the offering at the East African Petroleum Conference and Exhibition, in Mombasa, Kenya.

“Following this announcement, the Ministry will issue a Request for Qualification (RFQ) inviting interested firms and/or consortia to submit applications within a period of six months,” Mrs. Muloni told the congregants at Pride Inn, Paradise Beach Resort & Spa.

“Upon evaluation of the applications the successful firms/consortia will be issued with bidding documents comprising the model production sharing agreement and data sale regulations among others”.

Uganda is assuming that current, relatively high oil prices will help draw E&P companies to the offer, the second round in four years.

Muloni noted that the investment climate in Uganda was very conducive for investment singling out peace and security, infrastructure development, tax incentives and good human resource made of youthful and educated population.
The five blocks include; Avivi with an area coverage of 1026square kilometres, Omuka (750square kilometres), Kasuruban (1285square kilometres), Turaco (637square kilometres) and Ngaji (1230square kilometres).

The bidding process will take five months and result in the negotiations and signing of production sharing agreements between Government and the successful bidders. The licensing round is expected to be concluded with the award of Petroleum Exploration Licenses to successful firms by December 2020.

French major TOTAL has reached a binding agreement with American independent Occidental to acquire Anadarko’s assets in Africa (Algeria, Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa) for a consideration of $8.8Billion, in the event of a successful completion of Occidental’s ongoing bid for Anadarko.
The transaction is contingent upon Occidental entering into and completing its proposed acquisition of Anadarko and to approval by the relevant authorities and is expected to close in 2020.

The assets to be acquired are:
•Algeria: 24.5% participating interest and operatorship of blocks 404a and 208 (Hassi Berkine, Ourhoud and El Merk fields) in the Berkine basin in which Total already owns 12.25%. These fields represented a gross production of three hundred and twenty thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day (320KBOEPD) in 2018.

•Ghana: 27% participating interest in the Jubilee field and 19% participating interest in the TEN fields. These fields represented a gross production of 143KBOPD in 2018,
•Mozambique: 26.5% participating interest and operatorship in Area 1 where a 12.8 million tonne per year LNG project is largely derisked and close to sanction. Area 1 contains more than 60 Tcf of gas resources, of which 18 Tcf will be developed with the first two train project which is expected to come into production by 2024,
•South Africa: exploration licences, close to Total’s recent Brulpadda discovery.
“Overall, these assets represent around 1.2BillionBOE of 2P reserves, of which 70% is gas, plus 2BillionBOE of long term natural gas resources in Mozambique. 2018 equity production was 96KBOEPD and is expected to grow to around 160KBOEPD by 2025”, TOTAL says in a release.

“If completed, the acquisition of Anadarko by Occidental offers us the opportunity to acquire a world class portfolio of assets in Africa, further enhancing our position as the leading IOC on the continent. We have said consistently that our M&A activities will add value by playing to our strengths and focussing on upgrading our portfolio. This is exactly what we would do here. We would be able to leverage our expertise in LNG by operating a major project in Mozambique and in Deepwater in Ghana and we would become operator of major Algerian oil assets where we are already a partner. We would also be able to generate value through adding volumes to our growing LNG portfolio where we are already the 2nd largest private player. We have demonstrated the success of this strategy through the recent acquisitions of Maersk Oil.” Patrick Pouyanne, Chairman and CEO commented on the announcement.

“TOTAL is committed to execute smoothly this transaction, should Occidental be successful in its offer to acquire Anadarko. The proposed transaction is a win/win for TOTAL and Occidental. TOTAL would get access to around over 3Billion BOE of resources and Occidental would be able to strengthen its post completion balance sheet by monetising immediately the international assets of Anadarko.”

Despite the capital investment in Mozambique LNG, the acquisition is expected to be free cashflow positive from 2020 even at a Brent price of less than 50 $/b and to generate more than 1Billion $/year of free cashflow from 2025 onwards after start-up of Mozambique LNG, the release says.

It is official. The company was never keen on the country’s upstream. And now, the authorities have finally approved its offloading of its downstream assets for a total $1Billion to a vehicle controlled by Glencore, the oil trader.
The sale had dragged on for one year.

In March 2018, South Africa’s Competition Tribunal conditionally approved the acquisition of Chevron SA by Sinopec, one of China’s three oil and gas behemoths. But Glencore out-foxed Sinopec when it bankrolled Off The Shelf Investments — Chevron SA’s empowerment partner — to exercise its right of first refusal of the deal.

With a $1Billion loan from Glencore, and another conditional approval from the tribunal, Off The Shelf went on to acquire Chevron SA and renamed it Astron Energy. The deal was always that the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) partners would later transfer the controlling stake to Glencore.
Chevron SA’s assets include properties in South Africa and Botswana: a 110,000Barrels Per Day (BPD) refinery, a lubricants plant, 820 petrol stations, and oil storage facilities.

Glencore SA Oil Investments, the trader’s wholly owned subsidiary, says it is looking forward to working with the Astron management team, led by CEO Jonathan Molapo, to drive growth in the businesses as well as increasing the BEE ownership and localisation of the business in SA.”
Off The Shelf will retain its minority shareholding of 23% in Astron, and has the option to increase this to 30% — which will help Glencore meet the Competition Tribunal’s condition that it bolster the empowerment shareholding to 35%.

Until this transaction, South Africa and Botswana had been the last standing hosts of Chevron’s downstream assets.

But the company’s upstream and midstream presence in the region will be buoyed by its take over of Anadarko, which gives it 26.5% in Area 1 offshore Mozambique, with estimated 75Trillion cubic feet of gas about to be developed through LNG projects.

The combined company, Wintershall Dea, of German nationality, says it is now the leading independent gas and oil company in Europe.

“We are a European champion and are making an important contribution to Europe’s energy security,” explains Mario Mehren, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Wintershall Dea.

“Following the approvals granted by all relevant authorities, shareholders BASF and LetterOne successfully completed the merger on May 1, 2019. The merger was agreed in September 2018”.

Germany is not represented in the rank of oil majors. BP is British, Shell is combined Dutch and British, TOTAL is French, Chevron and ExxonMobil are American and ENI is Italian.

In terms of size, Wintershall Dea may not be as large as the top American independents; ConocoPhillips, Apache, Anadarko…But at least, in these waning days of the hydrocarbon era, it can boast of being a little king in the European Trade Area.

CGG has completed its acquisition of 9,800 line kilometre long-offset broadband two dimensional (2D) multi-client seismic survey “in the highly prospective Gabon South Basin”, the company reports. “Fast-track data sets will be delivered in batches from the end of April 2019, giving interested oil companies sufficient time to understand offshore petroleum systems and appraise blocks offered in Gabon’s 12th offshore licensing round”

Deadline for licence applications is September 30, 2019.

CGG has claimed credit for two “successful” wells drilled on acreages granted during Gabon’s 11 th round because they were drilled on data it acquired on those acreages.One of the wells, Boudji-1, drilled by the Malaysian state hydrocarbon company Petronas, is located in the south Gabon basin.

The just completed data set, CGG says, will help define the full extent of existing and new plays in the region. “It will also aid in understanding the thickness variations in the sediment overburden for source rock and maturity analysis”, CGG touts. “Broad bandwidth data will not only increase resolution and improve characterization of the turbidite systems that represent potential exploration targets, it also provides deep imaging penetration with low frequencies to help describe the nature of the crust. New insights from this data will expand and update CGG’s Gabon South Basin JumpStart™ integrated geoscience package”.

The Nigerian government has approved the request to revoke the licences of six Oil Mining Leases (OMLs) and one oil prospecting lease (OPL), in the onshore, shallow water and deepwater Niger Delta basin.

The request was made by the country’s Ministry of Petroleum Resources.

The assets are all held by Nigerian companies.

Revocation is the ultimate penalty for defaulting on royalty payments and the Nigerian government has not always be keen to wield the stick. Indeed, the country is perhaps the most lenient in Africa, in applying the full force of the law on oil acreage rent, especially when it concerns local E&Pcompanies.

The acreages affected include OML 98, an onshore asset located on the western flank of the Niger Delta, held by Pan Ocean, a company controlled by the Nigerian businessman Festus Fadeyi; OMLs 120 and 121, held by Allied Energy, which has changed its name to Erin Energy and has now gone bankrupt; OML 108, held by Express Petroleum, but whose technical activities are managed by Shebah Exploration & Petroleum, a company owned by Seplat Chairman A.B.C Orjiakor and OML 141, held by Emerald Resources whose principal, Emmanuel Egbogah, passed on recently..

The only OPL among the seven is OPL 206, held by Summit Oil International, a company founded by the late Moshood Abiola, politician and businessman, whose victory at the country’s Presidential elections in 1993 was annulled by the Military.

Angola is putting the acreages it offered in the botched 2015 Bid Round in the bid basket from 2020 to 2023.

The onshore Congo Basin (CON series) and Kwanza Basin (KON series) blocks, which were issued to local Angolan companies in 2016, are in the basket for the period.

CON1, CON5, CON6, among others in the onshore Congo Basin and Blocks KON5, KON6, KON8, KON9, KON17, KON20 in the Kwanza Basin, are among the 31 blocks to be in the open Public Tender.
Recall that these onshore blocks were the main constituents of the 2014/2015 bid round, advertised internationally, with roadshows in Houston and Singapore, but which after so much claim to “internationality”, the Angolan government turned around and awarded to local companies in 2016.
A year after, with nothing much done about the blocks in terms of funding, the state hydrocarbon company Sonangol, annulled the awards.
The proposed “2019 Angolan licencing round” that everyone has been talking about, however only starts in 2019 with Nine (9) blocks offered in the Namibe Basin and one block in the Benguela Basin, all under a public tender.
The remaining 45 blocks will be offered between 2020 and 2025.Please see details.

The one thing that is unclear about the decision of Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian President, to remove operatorship of Oil Mining Lease (OML) 11 from Shell and grant it to NNPC, the state hydrocarbon company, is whether he did so in consideration of Shell’s ongoing moves to divest its equity in the asset after it had been renewed.

Or whether the decision was due to pressure by the NNPC.

Or, for that matter, Mr. Buhari was unaware of Shell’s proposed divestiture, but was convinced the AngloDutch major wasn’t doing much with the asset because of the challenges it has operating in Ogoniland, which occupies about a quarter of the block.

OML 11 is the last of the 15, Shell-operated acreages, whose expiring licences have been approved for renewal by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), the country’s petroleum regulatory agency and a parastatal of the Nigerian Ministry of Petroleum Resources.

While the renewal of 14 blocks had been completed, that of OML 11 was kept on hold because it is larger than the maximum areal size allowed for a Mining Lease in the DPR’s current regulations.

And the DPR was working on carving the acreage into three, when a letter signed by Abba Kyari, President Buhari’s Chief of Staff, emerged in circulation, instructing NNPC/NPDC to confirm by May 2, 2019, that they have taken over operatorship of OML 11.

Shell has been in advanced conversation with Transcorp/Tenoil, for the purpose of divesting its equity in OMLs 11 and 17 to the latter, a Nigerian E&P group controlled by the businessman Tony Elumelu.

Officials at the Nigerian Ministry of Petroleum Resources are aware that Shell was in discussion to sell its equity in the lease after renewal, but they argue that the Ministry’s renewal processes are based on the fulfilment of the terms of holding the asset. “Shell can take us to court if we don’t renew”, say some ranking officials in the Ministry.

Equatorial Guinea’s 2019 Licencing Round, to be launched on April 2, will have 27 Blocks on auction.

25 of these blocks are offshore. Two are onshore.

The licencing round is for both hydrocarbon blocks and mining (minerals) concessions.

A high point of the sale, the third in seven years, is the presence, in the basket, of the former Block R, containing the Fortuna Gas field which was being developed by Ophir Energy. The field was to be monetised through a Floating LNG project, an initiative which had gone far. The project had secured an offtaker and an agreement had been signed for the vessel. But securing funding for the construction of the plant had been difficult.

The Equatorial Guinea government disallowed a renewal of that Block at expiry on December 31, 2018. Now it has changed the name of the block to EG-27.

Another asset on offer with existing discoveries is EG-23, which lies directly north-west of Marathon Oil operated Alba gas-condensate field and adjacent to the maritime boundary with Nigeria. It hosts the Estaurolita field, which is an undeveloped gas discovery, and Tsavarita field, which has commercial oil accumulations. A third prospect in the block is Sodalita West which is a non-commercial find.

The government is encouraging investors to take a look at the country’s segment of the Douala Basin, which straddles Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

Equatorial Guinea is an active Bid Round proposer. If the number of bid rounds it organises per decade is positively correlatable with hydrocarbon discovery and exploitation, the country should be producing several times the 175,000BOPD it currently does.